The Lega Cooperatives

Italy has the largest number of workers' cooperatives in the Western world, and the largest fraction of the workforce employed by such firms. Ammirato (1996: 319) reports that in 1989 there were 10,445 workers' cooperatives affiliated with one of four national federations, along with many others not so affiliated. This is likely to be an underestimate because cooperatives in the agricultural, housing, transport, and fishing sectors have been excluded along with so-called “mixed” coops. But data on the Italian coops are notoriously bad (Oakeshott, 1978; Zevi, 1982; Earle, 1986: 63–66), with Earle remarking that nobody really knows “how many co-ops are genuine and operative, and how many are dormant, embryonic, phantasmal or bogus” (1986: 203). For example, entirely conventional firms have sometimes registered as cooperatives in order to gain access to public subsidies. All numerical estimates must therefore be taken with a generous serving of salt.

By contrast with the plywood cooperatives and Mondragon, which developed with little state involvement, the Italian cooperative movement was heavily politicized from the outset, and has enjoyed tax advantages as well as preferential access to public land and contracts, job creation programs, loans and grants, and the financial expertise of public banking and research institutions. The national federations provide member cooperatives with more support than the plywood coops ever derived from their industry association, but have less formal authority than the central agencies of the Mondragon group.